Maryam Mirzakhani, the First Female Fields Medalist
“You have to be patient to see the beauty of Math”
“The beauty of mathematics only shows itself to more patient followers.”
— Maryam Mirzakhani (1977–2017)
There have been several female mathematicians in history. Some of them are known to the masses due to the amount of significant coverage they get from the mainstream media and some of them just remain hidden. The latter is the case most of the time. Recently, the announcement of the recipients of the Fields Medal was made for this year with four winners among which one is a female Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Sergiivna Viazovska making her the second female winner of the Medal and to date one of the only two females to win the prestigious honor.
This story is about the woman who not just transformed our understanding of several disciplines of mathematics but also inspired generations of aspiring mathematicians. In this article, I shall share the life story and the works of one of the most significant figures in the history of mathematics and the first female recipient of the Fields Medal, Maryam Mirzakhani.
The ‘genius’ child
Mirzakhani was born in the capital of Iran in 1977. She went to an only-girls school in Tehran as a kid. She was always interested in mathematics and playing around with numbers was one of her jolliest hobbies. Along with mathematics, her childhood hobbies included making stories and writing. In fact, in one of the interviews in 2014, she stated that she wanted to become a writer and not a mathematician. Her academic environment wasn’t as supportive for females in the field of mathematics as they were for males.
She had a hard chance to pursue her career in the field of mathematics but despite all odds she did, and she did amazingly well in the field. It wouldn't be unfair to say that she was a genius kid as she was exceptionally good at mathematics. At a very young age, she’d won several medals and honors in mathematical competitions some of which are outlined below:
Gold medalist in Iranian National Mathematical Olympiad, Junior and Senior Category.
Gold medalist in International Mathematical Olympiad, 1994, scoring 41 out to 42.
Two Gold Medals in International Mathematical Olympiad, Toronto 1995 scoring 42 out of 42.
Mirzakhani became the first-ever Iranian female to win gold medals in International Mathematical Olympiads.
She received her Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from the Sharif University of Technology in 1999 and in 2004 she completed her doctorate and received her Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University.
The hyperbolic space
After receiving her Ph.D. she became a fellow of the Clay Mathematics Institute and worked as an assistant professor of Mathematics at Princeton University till 2008. In 2009, she started her professorship journey at Standford Univerisity. Mirzakhani’s primary works revolved around “geometry and dynamical systems”.
In simple terms, Mirzakhani’s major works revolved around structures that you can put on a surface and the problems related to the space of those structures. Consider this example, if you hit a billiard ball on a billiard table, how far is it possible that if the ball moves forever in its trajectory that it can cover the entire table, or how many closed structures can the trajectory of the billard ball make. So her works focused on understanding the properties of such geometric structures on the surfaces.
Her works have great implications for our understanding of higher dimensional manifolds. The world we live in and perceive is three-dimensional, the question is what it would be like the geometry of the structures and surfaces of a higher dimensional entity or figure? Mirzakhani’s works on studying the geodesics and the types of, and the number of geodesics on hyperbolic surfaces shaped our understanding of geometry.
The Fields Medal
Fields Medal is the Nobel Prize equivalent in Mathematics. In 2014, the International Mathematical Union awarded Mirrzakhani with the Fields Medal for her works on moduli spaces and dynamical systems. She became the first Iranian to win a Fields Medal and the first-ever female to be honored with the Medal since the history the medal since 1936.
Her works and honors inspired millions all around the world and changed the perspective of how people look at mathematics. Generally, we understand math as an academic discipline that is useful in many other academic disciplines and several aspects of life. But the real pleasure of learning mathematics is to try to understand the world through the lens of numbers, patterns, and geometry. It’s for the beauty of it.
Mirzakhani died at the age of 40 in 2017 at Stanford due to breast cancer. Mirzakhani is considered to be one of the most accomplished mathematicians of the century.
“I don’t think that everyone should become a mathematician, but I do believe that many students don’t give mathematics a real chance. “
— Maryam Mirzakhani
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